Often business communications involve consultation with three or more parties. Today the process of setting up ad-hoc conferences is cumbersome if the party to be joined to the conference does not answer the phone. Instead of completing the conference with a conference join, the caller must drop the attempted new call leg. Conferencing can be further complicated if the missed party tries to return the call in the midst of the ad-hoc conference. These return calls are often simply ignored due to the possible disruption of the conference and the possibility that the caller is calling for a different reason than the topic of the conference.
There have been some attempts to address such problems. As one example, U.S. Patent Application No. 2007/0172045, the entire contents of which are hereby incorporated by reference, teaches a system for establishing a conference call is provided. The system includes a handset operable to send a message containing a list of prospective participants for the conference call. The system also includes an application server operable to receive the message and invite at least some of the prospective participants. The application server is further operable, in response to receiving an acknowledgement from at least one of the prospective participants to participate in the conference call, to include the at least one of the prospective participants in the conference call.
As another example, U.S. Patent Application No. 2007/0280464, the entire contents of which are hereby incorporated by reference, teaches a call management service for a communications system that is configured to automatically: receive telephone call data identifying a destination end point and identifying a source end point; initiate a call-back telephone call to said source end point to set-up a first call leg responsive to receiving said telephone call data; initiate a telephone call to said destination end point to set-up a second call leg; combine said first and second call legs together thereby to provide voice communication between said source and destination end points; and transmit call leg status signals for said voice communication over a separate real-time communications connections signaling link to a communications client associated with at least one of said end points.
As yet another example, U.S. Pat. No. 7,167,552, the entire contents of which are hereby incorporated by reference, teaches a method for joining a meet-me conference call that includes presenting an option to specify a quorum associated with a meet-me conference call, in response to user input to an application program co-resident with a terminal. In one embodiment, the user input includes but is not limited to an indication that the user is requesting to join a meet-me conference call. In one embodiment, the presenting an option to specify a quorum is done in response to the user input includes but is not limited to an indication that the user is requesting to specify a quorum either at the time at which a meet-me call is being scheduled, or at a time prior to a time at which a meet-me conference call is to transpire.
As still another example, U.S. Patent Application No. 2007/0165810, the entire contents of which are incorporated by reference, teaches a system and method for initiating a conference call. The method consists of a first participant initiating a first telephony session with a second participant. The first participant then places the second participant on hold, initiates a second telephony session with a third participant, and initiates the conference call. A SIP REFER message related to the second and third participants is sent to an application server. A SIP INVITE message is sent to the second and third participants. The first telephony session is replaced with a session between the second participant and a conference bridge. The second telephony session is replaced with a session between the third participant and the conference bridge.